YouTube Creators Split $650 Million
The two co-founders behind YouTube received Google stock valued at about $650 million, according to a regulatory filing made with the US Securities and Exchange Commission Wednesday, while Sequoia Capital, the VC firm that backed YouTube walked away with around $450 million based on Google's current share price.
Google for the first time detailed the $1.65 billion acquisition in the filing, saying YouTube CEO Chad Hurley received 694,087 shares of Google common stock, while co-founder Steve Chen received 625,366 shares and another 68,721 shares held in a trust.
The other big winners in the Google buyout were YouTube's investors, which besides Sequoia included the endowments of Harvard, Yale, Brown, Columbia, Oxford and other universities, along with the families behind the Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Getty fortunes.
Jawed Karim, who played an early role in YouTube's development but ended up returning to Stanford University, received around $65 million in stock.
Despite the financial windfall, Google's purchase of YouTube hasn't come without without difficulties. In a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Google admitted the YouTube acquisition may lead to additional liabilities.
"In addition, our planned acquisition of YouTube may also subject us to additional copyright claims upon the closing of the transaction," Google said. The company warned that any action could cause a loss of revenue.
YouTube has been a popular target for copyright infringement lawsuits, and from the Mountain View, Calif. search company's comments, Google Video is not immune to the same problems. Both allow unmoderated posting of videos, which often includes copyrighted material.
Viacom recently demanded that YouTube pull 100,000 videos that included its content without permission, and new NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker wasted no time taking a stand against YouTube, recently taking the video sharing site and NBCU partner to task for failing to implement copyright protections.